Remember that dreaded place in Dante's Inferno where the souls' only suffering is the perpetual knowledge that they cannot leave their dreaded in-between place either to ascend through Purgatory into Paradise or to descend further into the depths of hell?  They are stuck, not quite even inside Hell but surely not in Purgatory or Paradise, and that is precisely their greatest source of grief and pain.

I feel I can sympathize.  I am stuck in this terrible Limbo, this dreaded in-between place between the protective padding of my childhood and the vast, mysterious expanse of my future.

I am told that these years of my life are supposed to be the greatest, and that this is where I am to blossom into the wonderful flower I am designed to be... but I do not sense any of this "blossoming" happening. 

Like a stapler suspended in a jello mould, I feel ridiculously useless and alone.
As if this must be a joke.

Perhaps it is of my own doing.  Perhaps I avoid forming friendships, thinking if I close my eyes my life will fast forward to where I want to be.

I do not want to believe the false notion that finding my husband, getting married, and starting a family will cause all this to go away, suddenly jostling me out of my Limbo and into the "reality" of my heavenly realms.  But what tells me that this notion is false?